The RIAA now will count Youtube, Spotify, Rdio, and other online plays towards an album's certification. 100 plays on an online streaming source now counts as equivalent to one album sale. This change has already caused certain albums to receive new certifications, including Adele's "Rolling in the Deep", The Black Keys "Lonely Boy", Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance", M83's "Midnight City", and Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean"

Billboard did the same thing. That's how "Harlem Shake" got to the top of the charts despite having only a modest number of
downloads (and plays on YouTube for the full song, but the clips people danced to counted for some ridiculous reason.)

this is completely arbitrary....a sale is a sale. FREE streams are not sales."

Ya but people get paid for youtube subscribers and hits and whatnot. I think this is just the next step in the future of marketing since physical sales of music are becoming futile and everything is becoming digital.

Well, Spotify gives some cents or fractions of a cent to the artist for every listen... Maybe they get as much money for a hundred streams as they would get for the single on iTunes or something like that. Don't know about the other sources.

"Ya but people get paid for youtube subscribers and hits and whatnot. I think this is just the next step in the future of marketing since physical sales of music are becoming futile and everything is becoming digital."